


All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

by fig0newton



Series: The Constant Revolutionizing of Production [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Backstreet Boys References, Biracial Harry Potter, Character Study, Draco Malfoy Feels, Gryffindor/Slytherin Inter-House Relationships, Harry Potter Has a Saving People Thing, Hogwarts Eighth Year, M/M, Overuse of italics, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Survivor Guilt, Time Travel, Trans Draco Malfoy, Trans Male Character, author is projecting again oh no, the prose isn't even purple it's effing muave
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24658405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fig0newton/pseuds/fig0newton
Summary: He wonders, sometimes, how the tree had chosen his name. But then he chooses to believe it doesn't matter. His name Draco Malfoy and he is going to make fate itself bow at his feet. He deserves that, at the very least.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Draco Malfoy & Pansy Parkinson & Blaise Zabini, Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Series: The Constant Revolutionizing of Production [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1791175
Comments: 3
Kudos: 34





	1. All fixed, fast-frozen relations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **"All fixed, fast-frozen relations,** with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. **All that is solid melts into air,** all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind."  
>  _\- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "The Communist Manifesto."_
> 
> (Although, from what I've heard, it was mostly Engels on the literary prowess front.)

_Two words. Two words. Two words._

Draco Malfoy cannot breathe, so this mantra is his new heartbeat. The second after the Chief Warlock opens his mouth is a brutalizer. It’s shaking and ripping down to sodden, bloodied bone. It’s sweet nothings here to take him whole. It’s warm cinnamon seduction spitting his newly emptied shell into a glittering cage.

Draco is nineteen. He fears too much time. When it was his father’s turn the hours hadn’t felt like nearly enough. They were here, and then they were there, and then “they” couldn’t really include Father anymore. (And then the scar they’d flayed into the world together healed itself. Just a little. Just enough.) Now he can’t help but think how the _knowing_ must ravage the mind, that all the “you” in the world has been stamped with an expiration date.

At least his mother is safe. She’d been one to get two words, thanks to Harry Potter and the bare skin of her forearm. The intensity of Draco’s relief had been enough to make him weep openly, in front of court and reporters alike. The Chief Warlock had to have him sent out early.

And now that same sour, wizened mouth moves to form words, and the gnarled motors of time run around each other, taunting the universe to the exclusion of themselves. The British Wizarding World collectively holds its breath.

_Breath._

_Breathe._

_Breathing._

_Release._

The examiner bellows “not guilty” and Draco swears he can hear the courtroom itself groan in stunted agony.

 _Not guilty._ Two words.

They refresh, pull his roots from the decay of soft ground and plant them in a sunnier pasture. Draco does **not** die today. His body is smoke set aflame, incorporeal and traumatized but _safe_ , even if by nature alone.

_Two words._

He is becoming all over again.

A hand claps his back, and for a second the _surprise_ of it takes him. Draco must remind himself this is what people do. They touch and are touched and live to touch others again. This is normal and Draco will learn this—not just because he _will be_ normal but because he now has a future to be normal in.

He now has a future. It blossoms in open disregard of the past.

“We did it!” Harry Potter sounds so elated Draco can nearly feel his mother thinking it obscene. She who must withhold smirks and dim eyes. Draco is the only one left who might extrapolate her emotions from these cues, and this only after a lifetime of study.

 _Pureblood women are not beholden to their emotions. You control **them** , not the other way around._ Her lectures iced his scrapes on sunny August afternoons, upturned lips so familiar and yet so distant Draco could never be wholly sure if she was truly “feeling” at all, or if smiling was merely an idea she’d picked up like a football in a random field and deemed peculiar enough to practice. He supposes that’s the idea.

It’s fine, though. Draco has always felt enough for them both.

In his childhood, that feeling was for fame. He was a boy waking up from a nightmare and positive attention was a torch hidden under pillow. But now Draco has the attention of millions and the thought remains: nothing is _right_.

Potter is smiling at him. It’s unsettling for a buffet of reasons, pick one pick all. The smile means leaving, means rewriting, means escape. But Draco isn’t sure if he deserves any of these things. He also isn’t sure if he can turn from their warmth. So he rips his eyes away, jaw locked tighter than Snape’s old store cupboard. (He has studied and practiced; he can mimic those pureblood women, even if he has never been one of them.)

 _Two words._ Not guilty.

Incorrect in every regard. But, hell, he’ll take them.

Draco remembers being young and in pain.

Once upon a time, he was six, watching his mother and father prepare for a dinner party. Father wanted Cornelius Fudge to be the new Minister for Magic; Mother was fresh of face and (apparently) outwardly pleasurable, so her suggestion “might actually make the old fool consider running," as Father said.

His parents were always distinct entities. They seemed happy enough, gliding where others might crash, but rarely did one possess enough gravity to pull the other in closer than absolutely necessary. The relationship was more business than marriage, albeit amicable.

Some days, Draco thought himself a star directing their orbits, a great conductor bringing jazz, if not purpose, to homogeneity. Others, he was a meteor circling a negligible mass, glaring wistfully as the distant planets basked in light Draco knew did not exist for him.

That day, he must have fancied himself a garden flower, ready to leach life from the sun and tool it a purpose all his own. So, Draco watched his mother at her vanity.

Narcissa moved delicately, always, deliberate movements melding skin, rouge and powder crafting a sweetness entirely unlike herself. The makeup was rich velvet, foreign to the sick stickiness and artificial sheens of Draco’s birthday presents, which bore fruity names, “Razzlecherry” and “Lime-a-licious.” He never tried them, just emptied out the maquillage and foisted their carcasses onto a House Elf for disposal. In his room was an empty jewelry box filled with ironic air. The meaning of it was not his to know.

Mother tried more than once to catch Draco’s eyes in the mirror, as if wanting sight to impart her wisdom or force some moment of plasticine sameness. She had often tried to share a _knowing_ between them, but Draco was never able to know in that way. Her smile did nothing to counteract the wrongness of it all, just as it could not unfurl the tight twists in Draco’s gut, nor smooth away the disjointed longing that grew through him.

That night, Draco was a garden flower growing towards the wrong sun.

“Come here,” Narcissa had called to him. “Would you like to try it?”

There was a rebellion of synapses. His body propelled forward, magic popping and bubbling beneath thick skin. No, he did not want to try it. But he’d been here before, knew with all certainty that this was not an offer, but a beg. An olive branch. Neurons fired, ordered him to snatch it.

Then, lightning. The silver tube, millimeters from Draco’s lips, shot away, like some invisible savior had spelled it from his mother’s hand.

 _Thud_. By the time it met carpet, the ruby-red velvet had transformed into a stick of white chalk.

Shock fluttered and took flight behind Narcissa’s eyes. This was not an incident alone, rather just a single line in a single file in a catalogue taller than Draco would ever grow.

“It’s fine, darling. Just an accident,” she told him. Narcissa’s hand cupped Draco’s cheek, alien warmth making him flinch. Even when she retracted, his cool skin felt the remnant whispers of heat. They could never be comfort, yet would never be enough. “You’re getting so strong,” she said.

Draco nodded, silent as she de-transfigured her lipstick. This act was implicit forgiveness, later rationalized as misguided understanding. It was the understanding that she wouldn’t tell his father of this newest incident, nor burden Draco with her suspicions.

Years later, when his world has expanded and collapsed in every plausible configuration, people will ask Draco how he first came to “know” about himself. They cock their heads and wait to define his personhood in the arbitrary validity of tearful or humorous or violent story, as if there should be an oblique point of revelation, a river that may be crossed in only one direction. But Draco has never known such a place.

Instead, he tells them tales of noticing, of quirks, of accidental magic. He tells them the easy, brushes in black and white and forever, coats his own life in a thin veneer because the alternative is to be _unknowable_. Silenced.

He ignores the chalk in his throat and the lies queuing for his tongue.

He tells them stories about lipstick.

No more than a fortnight after his trial, Draco emerges onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

The station is a tin of sardines packed with salt and brine. _This is normal,_ he tells himself. They jostle, are jostled, and live to jostle others again. It’s funny, almost, how Draco has become so sensitive to it while living in this world. He adds it to the list of things he must fix.

 _Number Thirty-Four: Sensitivity_. He can’t be sure, but this recent sentimentality may be part of the particular magic he has felt floating around Muggles since his branding. It makes his mark burn, but he knows investigating can’t be worth breaking his parole. The Ministry probably cast the ward in the first place. They need to account for the realities of his past, and his father’s past, and his ‘best not to dwell on that’ past. No one can blame them. Draco is a ~~not guilty~~ _criminal_. He needs boundaries and boarders and constant fucking reminders of this fact.

He also _really_ needs to work on the sensitivity. It’s making him senile.

But no, he’s going to dwell on it for just another second, because then there’s the fact that someone out there thinks Draco is going to just decide to _do some murder_ on a wet and clouded day in September, in the presence of Muggles and wizards alike, with no hope of an alibi because yes, of course that would certainly be the most cunning—the most _Slytherin_ —thing to do. How astute of the caster for noticing his blasted plan. How clever those goons at the Ministry must think themselves for fooling him again.

It’s insulting, more than anything. And then he wills it to be over.

In reality—that thing semi-continuously existing outside of Draco’s head—his mother smooths the collar of his school robes. Narcissa’s fingers fall heavy over Draco’s clavicle, immeasurably present on the skin despite layers of cloth and bandage between their respective heats. She tactfully ignores his injury, but for Draco the dressing is dually pain and comfort. Its pressure is pubescent, reminds him of days when his problems lay strapped to his chest, not lighting fires in the social tundra outside of him.

“Are you well, darling?” Mother keeps asking. The words fumble with each other, trying to pull a weight they aren’t equipped to carry. Draco never knows what to answer, just that every round of silence slices at them both.

She can tell he is a mess. That small smile is meant to remind Draco it is time to upholster his own defenses. Appearance is her genius, even as the stares around them intensify. Their name—rather, Draco’s name, now—is vitriol. The _Malfoy’s_ : father and son Death Eaters, mother complicit, father sentenced to un-life, son let off with multiple warnings and strict instructions to _return_.

(Of course the bloody _Prophet_ would have gotten wind of the last bit, with Potter raising hell in every dusty corner of the Ministry prior to Draco’s release. It was embarrassing, but worse than that, it was stupid. Couldn’t Potter understand how hard this would make it? Didn’t he realize that, even if they were successful, they would at least have to endure the coming months?)

 _Either way, this isn’t really a returning,_ Draco told himself. You can’t go back to a place you’ve cursed out of existence. Time is fickle like that, always bending inwards and squashing what you want. It’s a truism Potter doesn’t seem to understand.

_But he must see it now_ , Draco tells himself. 

This victory is wholly unlike the last. There is no joviality, no grief. Students mill about one another: retired soldiers drunk with missing, helter-skelters of confusion and apathy, little dense and breakable marbles crashing into one another in a blind quest for _return_. For normalcy. After all, who knows how long they’ll have this time? They cannot truly believe it is over. So their glass parts shatter slowly, fragments infecting communal wound. There is no healing, no forgetting, nothing but continuation, more cracks and breaks. Draco wonders how long it will be before their world is dust. For now, it is shocked still, balancing idly on the same pin He had crafted for it. They are all numb from its smallness.

So of course the platform is different—less full? No. Less empty?—and Draco’s own recollections are skewed like sunlight reflected off glass.

“Draco?”

“I’m fine, mother.”

The presence of death marks them all survivors. Luck-takers, perhaps, who got away on a collection of little fires throughout time. Scorching is what saved them, the complete decimation of all paths leading to that somewhere else Draco is so afraid of.

The dead—the ones who couldn’t have enough burnt away—are just… gone. It’s almost gentle. They are unpopulated spaces and somber tones, leaching the world of a little spice and leaving behind something just barely blander than it was before—not enough to notice solitarily, but also a pinch farther than what would be indistinguishable to a palate that has tasted them both.

(The thought of Crabbe overwhelms Draco for a moment, but he waits for the grief to dull, just like everything else. His mind healer might be proud.)

“Remember to owl.”

“I will.”

 _Perhaps_ … perhaps. There is nothing to postulate that won’t choke him with jaw-breaking implications. Draco is just becoming far too emotional. There is no past; there is no returning. So there is truly nothing to postulate, not really.

Anyway, he set his mind the moment Potter said “time.” Draco will not be a part of this.

He is going to shuffle off this pinhead of a world. He must.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Draco remembers being young and in pain.

It’s dull and nebulous, a déjà vu weaving together the threads of Draco’s pre- and post- existence.

He begins with the “pre.”

It ached. Not a lot, and not consistently, but always just enough that he would be struck by the _remembering_ of it on a cold night in February and find himself staring—just staring—sometimes for minutes that engorged themselves to hours and sometimes for hours that were really splinched seconds. He would start with the ceiling, or maybe some garish wallpaper, or the dower portrait of some great-whatever who would hate him on sight or realization, whichever came first. Still, eventually and, well, inevitably Draco's eyes would meet the mirror.

He was always a little surprised when he saw himself, always a little surprised at the remembering he had reflection, had a body.

It was lighting. Sudden, painful, and fucking terrifying. His mother used to tell him that lightning never strikes the same place twice, but Draco knew she was wrong because lightning was practically his stalker. It was when he piqued his mother’s suspicion, when he flared his father’s unforgiveness, when he saw himself, saw what everyone else must see.

It was lipstick, in a way. Or maybe chalk. The good part about both is that they eventually and, well, inevitably, run out.

His last time with lightning came gently. The house elf saw it first, then Mother and Father, and, finally, Draco.

 _Draco_.

It was crudely simple, really, how they all discovered it. His entry changed on the family tapestry, a new identity springing to life in the shifting of a few threads. And it hurt less, and Draco became less young with it. At least he gets spared the indignities of _explaining_. Purebloods don’t talk about it, anyway.

(He wonders, sometimes, how the tree chose his name. Was this innate, or had some ancestral magic simply realized he’d make a shite girl, if he ever was one? But then he chooses to believe it does not matter. His name is Draco Malfoy, and he is going to make fate itself bow at his feet. He deserves that, after what it has done to him.)

Draco had always felt unmoored. He was, at once, a lighthouse, a hurricane, and a sailor stuck on a sinking ship. The issue was him, and the issue was him, and the issue was him. And that was too many issues for anyone, best to pick one and stick it with the family heirlooms. But then the real problem—the one he dealt with, at least—was figuring out which one really _was_ him. Why save the sailor? What if he was supposed to choose the hurricane?

Purebloods don’t talk about it, but Draco learns to prune subtext like a bored toddler plucks at a garden, grasping and tearing until they’ve managed to bare a little corner of the world. Underneath it all, he finds sublimations of relief. Father liked to say that at least “this nasty business” had ensured the Malfoy name would “grow on” without additional seeds—shouldn’t they all be thankful for _that_ blessing.

(He wonders, sometimes, if this is why his mother loves him so. Her first pregnancies were unrooted in the midst of bloom, and then Draco clawed his way through her like a carnivorous vine reaching for its father’s praise. But then he chooses to believe it does not matter. Reason could only cloud emotion. As long as she believes she feels it, despite her upbringing and sensibilities, Draco knows it is real enough.)

Purebloods don’t talk about it; they settle on subtler fantasies. Draco was informed his body needs “extra” to do its job, but never explicitly _why_. He knew, of course, just as he knew they thought him sick, just as he didn’t exactly know what this made him, just as he searched for what he was.

So, there was St. Mungo’s and there were potions and there was a mind healer. The latter was the arbiter of a trail leading nowhere. Draco didn’t have damage—not yet, at least—just what he comes to perceive as a mental miswiring. The healer was desired, nonetheless.

Purebloods don’t seem to talk about anything, and sometimes Draco could feel the swallowed words staging wars in his throat. With her, he could purge their malintent safely, let them flow outwards before the letters unionized to clot, rope, and strangle him.

It happened rather suddenly that his father discovered the healer's blood status. Draco was just turning eleven. Excuses were contrived, higher-ups paid off, and Draco ordered never to go back. The rope tightened, but at least St. Mungo’s and the potions remained. These were his tools and Draco would use them to learn how to speak.

But he never did get to ask her the difference between the sailor and the hurricane.

(He wonders, sometimes, why he puts in the work of existing while needing extra. But then he chooses to believe it matters. His name is Draco Malfoy. He is real enough.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun Fact: alternate name was "Magnetic Materials" because this is 3,152 words.


	2. Universal inter-dependence of nations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, **universal inter-dependence of nations.** And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world-literature."

This morning, over breakfast and his mother’s watching, Draco read Rita Skeeter’s latest.

_Hogwarts is a clash of fortification and crumble._

If this is true (it is, and it is painful that this may be the only true thing Skeeter ever puts to print), Draco is the ruined prince ignoring it all. He does not notice the stares at his back, or the scars on stone, or the tell-tale dark magic sending poltergeist pains up his arm.

He wants this truth dearly, like he wants to be nothing, to be unknown, to be truly free. He gets none of these things. So, he tells himself that flesh is flesh, stone is stone, eyes just eyes: immutable. Attributes adding to unnecessity.

The eighth-year house table is an old, decrepit thing, looking like it was pulled from the Room of Requirement and possesses less stability than Potter’s new government. It lies at the juncture between staff and student, ready for sliding into like saccharine fruit into half-set jelly. The three remaining Slytherins sink into solemnity: they are losers, knowingly, or at least people who know that’s what they are seen as.

Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff—their lot crowds the other end of the table, leaving residuals and empty seats be. This table is far too large for the sixteen ~~veterans~~ students who chose to return, so an almost natural fissure has formed between the cunning and the less-so.

“I hadn’t thought about what it would be like,” says Blaise, despondent. “I’d considered classes and people and the castle but not….”

“The people,” Pansy supplies. “Everything is different.”

 _They do not deserve this,_ thinks Draco. Being icons for the bitter and fled. But they are Slytherins, the only two of their ilk to take the optional year. The rest are dead, imprisoned, or have jetted off to somewhere less devastating.

_Good on them._

Draco wants to offer them some condolences, reprieve, but there is none. They chose this, after all. “So, it’ll be just like everywhere else, then,” he says instead.

The following silence is uneasy, made more so by Potter’s trailing voice singing some awful Muggle song in three keys. On some level, Draco wants to deny he is experiencing this, on account of him _not_ watching and _not_ noticing the half-blood boy. Instead, he catalogs: Potter’s hair has grown longer, flapping about as he nods to syncopations Draco does not fully understand, curling where it comes down over the bridge of his nose and the rims of his—thank Merlin _not_ duct tape monstrosities, but rather classic frames that suit his fuller face. His skin has gone a deeper brown, like he’s spent the last few weeks playing Quidditch in the Weasley’s garden. Not that Draco would have noticed at all, only—

“Draco!” Pansy is waving a hand in his face. “I understand you’re excited ‘Backstreet’s Back’ but _please_ find a less-obvious way to ogle the Chosen One. Slytherin doesn’t need the shame.”

Blaise breaks away from his own fascinations (Longbottom, then Pansy, then Longbottom again) to say, “Oh, come of it, Draco and I are men of taste, and _everyone_ knows NSYC is the superior boy band.”

Pansy turns livid faster than Draco can think to ask what they’re talking about. Taste? As if you’ve ever been able to tell talent from a good wank!”

“Well, at least I didn’t need a nose job to have my way with someone.”

“No, you just needed your left hand,” Pansy scoffs. “What’s the matter, Blaisey, Mummy kill stepdad number seven? Feeling a little lonely?”

A goblet topples to the floor as Blaise stands, Pansy following suit with a napkin and assorted cutlery. More than a few glances turn their way, and for a moment Draco finds himself comparing the indignencies of staying versus hiding under the table.

“Is that a touch of jealousy, Pansy? It really is _so_ unfortunate Millicent felt the need to run to _America_ just to get away from you. Although, I guess you’re used to it. Did Daddy-dearest ever come back from the Caribbean?”

 _Enough._ Something in Draco lashes out, banging a fist on the table with as much authority as he’s ever been able to feign. Pansy is right: Slytherin doesn’t need the shame.

“ _Please_ ,” he hisses. “We. Are. In. Public.”

Pansy and Blaise lower themselves slowly, as if afraid to see whatever terrifying tricks they’re apparently sure Draco’s picked up since their last argument.

He backtracks. “And, as someone who has spent the better part of a year trying not to get executed, can someone please tell me what the fuck is an NSYNC?”

Something between them fractures as his voice drops out, smiles erupting and bubbling over in old feelings.

“Draco,” says Pansy, doing her best impression of shock. “Authoritarianism is no excuse to ignore _cultural phenomena_.”

Blaise chimes in with his very best impression of a pompous ass with, “My good friend Pansy is entirely correct, of course. I, for one, move that we should use this feast as an opportunity to begin Draco’s reeducation.” He turns, glinting with ~ideas~ and a sick sense of humor. “Don’t worry lad, we’ve got you in good hands.” And then he uses his hand—the left, disgustingly—to ruffle Draco’s perfectly preened hair.

“Bastard!” For a moment, Draco is stuck on the idea that Blaise uses that hand to wank, but then his place in the old repertoire comes to call, gliding in furiously with his compatriot’s chuckles and his own indignation. “My father will hear of this! He’s got friends at the Ministry, you know!”

And then they are all laughing, harder, perhaps, than they have ever allowed themselves together. It tiptoes around the grotesque, and they catch more than a few waves of disparagement—good students are dead, don’t you know, traitors—but Draco can’t help but think that laughter like this is _necessary_. They must remember who they were, who they still are. Remember that some things needn’t be serious.

Pansy is an insecure bully, Blaise a regal slut, and Draco an entitled asshole. Their relationship hurts, almost, because they can wholly understand the way dark humor picks at a person, how it nourishes through the cracking and infection of inheritance, wounds you do not choose to carry.

Together, they are perfect.

Well, they cope. Somewhat.

And it’s that which lets Draco feel the pin shift, lets him evoke the repressed feelings and topple them upward. He must decide it’s a good feeling, one to store in a memory for the next time he begins to believe this—recovering, recover _y_ —is not possible.

_Two words._

_Start over_.

Then Potter starts staring again. And then Draco admits he wouldn’t have noticed if he weren’t doing the same, again.

(He can almost feel the Dark Lord at his back, begging him _back._ Only this must he fake. He does not beg.)

Not so long ago, Draco pretended their obsessions were functions of the war. If not conscious tactic, then implicitly beneficial tic.

But now the war has ended, and the preoccupation remains. For them both, it seems. Potter is still watching him when the sorting begins.

The hat sings about how they all need therapy—probably, Draco’s never really listened to ye old thing—and McGonagall pretends that half of her new appointments aren’t made because someone went and got murdered. It’s that thing Draco hates, when grown-ups decide the “children” ~~fellow veterans~~ are all too traumatized to handle reminders. That they’ll forget faster if everyone shuts up. That they should be looking to forget in the first place.

Potter is still watching him. _He wants to forget_. To make them all forget.

But then the impossible happens. There is a new crop of kids, some of them Slytherins bless them, that weren’t _there_ , weren’t **here** when it happened. Of course, no one claps for the cunning young eleven-year-olds so Pansy and Blaise charm the silverware into a ruckus that almost counters the other three houses’ intercommunal cacophony.

“Come on Draco!” Pansy has the spare forks mimic a trapeze. “Show some spirit!”

“Yeah, Draco,” teases Blaise. He is making the knives into Russian dancers.

Malfoy shakes his head at the both of them. “I’m not planning on breaking my parole until next week, thanks!”

But he’s still thralled, really, but the _realness_ of the act. They are students, still, and this is still a school, and there exist these children younger than them—younger than this debt and _trauma_ they carry—who will live in those spaces they lived. Who will unknow everything they’ve known, and make new memories in the hallways and corners where Draco can still see bodies and fire and blood.

Potter wants them all to forget, quite literally; Pansy and Blaise are still playing circuses with silver.

Eventually, his fellow Slytherins send a spoon flying into some Ravenclaw’s pumpkin juice, prompting their new Headmistress to deliver unto them the first detention of the term. _Oh, the shame._ More eyes on them, on him, as people are directed and realize and _remember_.

The rest of the feast passes in a haze of embarrassment. Half from what he knows people are thinking, half because Blaise and Pansy, protesting their detentions, have decided to bellow the “best hits” of this decade’s American boy bands to the hall. If Draco didn’t know better, he’d have thought what they “really, really want” was more detentions for the lot of them.

McGonagall dutifully supplies, this time including Draco because apparently she can’t distinguish between his frog croaks and Blaise’s parrot squawking. It’s just insulting, really.

Immediately, Potter-I-Must-Be-The-Hero-Chosen One zooms over with the force of an angry Hippogriff. “But, Professor—”

Whatever the procured alibi, it is silenced by McGonagall and Draco’s teamed glares.

For this injustice, Potter decides to start and equally (though some might say exceedingly) loud rendition of “Bye Bye Bye.” The disparaged Slytherins, including Draco this time—because fuck it he’s already got detention and what’s worse than Azkaban, anyway—provide backup by charming anything in reach.

“So much for your parole, mate,” Blaise yells over the tumble and chime of ten goblets playing bumper-brooms. Draco grins so hard his face hurts.

McGonagall allows them half a chorus before breaking up the band. Her stare is enough to trigger some fear seeded deep in Draco’s psyche, and he follows without question.

_Trying not to die, trying not to die, trying not to die._

As the four makeshift maestros are dragged from the entrance hall, Potter cries, “Thank you, thank you! We’ll be here all year!”

The students erupt in bemused (what is Harry Potter doing with a bunch of Slytherins, let alone a war criminal?) cheering at their Chosen One’s request.

As the doors close, Draco takes a moment to mourn his potatoes over the frenetic circling in his head. They were _really_ good potatoes, almost as steamy as McGonagall, and far fluffier.

“This is no example for seasoned students such as yourselves to be setting!” the headmistress castigates them. “Rest assured I will be contacting your guardians, and 20 points will be taken from each of your houses!”

“Uh, Professor, we—”

“I am well aware of your age, Miss. Parkinson.”

“I think Pansy was going to say—”

“ _Do not interrupt me Mr. Zabini_. While I understand your youthful inclinations, this is no excuse to ‘raise the roof’ at a seated event! Since the four of you can’t seem to behave in a manner befitting Hogwarts students, I see no other choice than to remove you from the remainder of the feast,” she says gravely.

Potter groans, probably, like Draco, smelling the just-served deserts. “But Professor—”

The Headmistress doesn’t acknowledge him. “Miss. Parkinson, Mr. Zabini, you’ll report to Mr. Filch on Monday, 10 o’clock. Mr. Potter, Mr. Malfoy, you’ll assist Mr. Slughorn with his grading after NEWT Potions.”

Potter grabs his stomach once McGonagall’s out of earshot, groaning. “I was really looking forward to the treacle tart.”

“ _I’m_ really looking forward to her realizing we don’t have houses anymore,” says Blaise.

They look around, laughing under the gaze of some no-doubt miffed paintings (“Really, no way to behave. Back in my time…”).

“So, this way to the eighth-year dorms then,” Blaise says once he’s recovered, pointing to the east staircases. “Better hurry, this one likes to move about. Oh, there it goes….”

The four eighth-years break into a run, Draco trying to focus on the beating of his heart instead of cataloging the mess around him (it doesn’t work, but he does realize he needs to start exercising more regularly).

He finds himself thinking about the first-years, about their innocence, their ability to neglect the terrible and painful and amazing thing that had been done for them. About how in a few years Professor Bins would drone on about prophecies and snakes. About how someday more than a few students would leave an OWL question on “The Battle of Hogwarts” completely black for their ignorance.

Draco understands why others want the forgetting. It’s a serene prospect: the end of an era, a communal shunning of pain. Maybe that’s the only way to truly make history: to make it stop hurting. To place the past on a pedestal and neglect that it could have been you. That it very nearly was you.

The thought is unsettling in a way Draco cannot understand, but he smooths out the twists by telling himself this is a healing he can help. That one day he might be able to live with himself. That a little reprieve from the shame might as well be praxis.

That night, Draco is clear of mind. Blaise and Potter sleep in adjacent beds (which Draco tells himself is only a little because Potter was the sole lad willing to room with them and is not at all because the Chosen One is collecting his debt).

The rooms themselves have been furnished in every garish shade of blue, green, red, and yellow perceivable to men. Blaise takes one look and sighs about it “looking like a pride parade.” Potter barely laughs before charming his sheets red. (The Slytherins make a silent decision to keep theirs as-is. No need to poke a seething bear.)

Draco Malfoy falls asleep humming silly songs and remembering the slope of laughter. He is plunging off the pinhead feet-first.

Draco remembers being young and in pain, pulling chocolates from his mother’s letters and laughing with ease. He wrote his second love letter—the first was from childhood, a crayon-calamity sent to the little muggle girl living down the hill from his family’s summer cottage, whose hair he’d described at the time as having “smelled like love,” only later learning it was coconut milk and vanilla pods and cinnamon spice and the blunt shame of miscegenation—at the Slytherin house table, shielding his parchment from Crabbe and Goyle in case his favorite dunderheads had somehow learned to read. A tawny school owl delivered the letter to Viktor Krum the next day.

It was a fleeting crush, the kind you might get from boarding a boat of fans and forgetting to maintain your own feelings on the journey. Draco thinks back on it now with a similarly swift cringe-and-repress kneejerk.

He remembers his first time, experimenting with Pansy in her room, quiet because it was July and she’d cracked open a window to dispel some heat. The tightness of the coil just below his belly, the way he instinctively leaned into that feeling despite not immediately knowing if it was good, or even pleasurable. He’d expected to feel different, like a girl or some other foreign thing, but all Draco really felt was warm.

That is, until he turned on her, laying his body atop hers and making those common, fumbling attempts to balance proactive and reactive touch. He wasn’t good at it, not really, but Draco knew when he saw her face, felt her wetness clench around him and spasm softly, that he wanted to be. That he wanted _this_ , needed it in some ways, to feel the completeness of having someone give themselves to you. Trust you. Of taking that trust and control and turning it into untensed, unrestrained bliss.

Draco also remembers his sixth year, and the banal flaccidity of low-grade anxiety refusing to peak or dissipate. Like being on the cliffs of pleasure, edging forward and back for eternity. Nothing ever stays. Draco thinks, sometimes, that what he wants is not to feel _something_ , but to feel something _different_.

He supposes this could apply to other things. Forgiveness. Fear.

Remembering.

The first week of return whizzes and spurs, grinding them all a little harder than they’d though to expect.

The professors aren’t quite as lenient as Draco had hoped, citing end of year exams and the need to teach a year and a half of material in two-thirds the time. Blaise recons they’re just trying to keep everyone busy and avoid another school-wide trauma.

For Draco, the last two years have been a strong mix of the Dark Arts and attempted murder. He remembers practically nothing from his OWLS, and even less from his few months of certified NEWT curriculum. He hadn’t thought he’d need them, given the whole murder-or-be-murdered thing, but death has had a harder time catching up with him than anyone would have guessed. In the aftermath and meantime, Draco Malfoy is returning to basics: he is going to _be somebody_ , a nebulous goal that, according to Slughorn, requires Potions.

“A Draught of Living Death,” the Potions Master blathers. “Some of you will remember it from your sixth year, of course.”

A few heads nod, including Potter’s. Most remain still. Trauma has a way of eating away at nonrelated memories, at least in Draco’s case. As it does attention spans. He spots Pansy nudging Blaise slyly and pointing at the store cupboard, whispering something. They’ve been doing that a lot, lately.

“Very good, very good. Yes, well, it has been a while for some of us.” He glances around knowingly. “Rest assured everything you should need to know is on page forty-seven. Now, open your books. On the count…. One, two, _begin_.”

With a clap, the classroom comes to motion, students playing cogs in a wind-up toy. Draco begins leafing through his copy of _Advanced Potions Making_ , pretending to ignore the faces Pansy and Blaise are making at each other across caldrons.

What follows is an hour of trying not to cause a spontaneous combustion or fall asleep in his cauldron. Draco is usually mediocre at potions—not a perfect student by any means, but he can follow instructions well enough to avoid a Troll—but this one is particularly tedious and, anyway, he doesn’t think a passable murder potion is going to make anyone feel better about his being there.

This of course results in him almost causing that fated spontaneous combustion. Luckily, Potter catches his hand before Draco can add asphodel (the few tendrils that escape his grip shoot out of pewter like fireworks), and within seconds Slughorn has vanished his… well, one might call it an _attempt_ at a potion.

“Good reflexes, Harry. One more second and Mr. Malfoy here would have added a new classroom to the repairs list,” the professor chuckles without meaning. For the first time, Draco realizes he’d been there with the rest of them. “If you could partner with Mr. Malfoy, my boy, perhaps show him the ropes during your detentions?”

Potter nods, smirking as if he expected nothing less (Draco remembers that feeling. A not-insignificant part of him wants it back). “Or course, professor. I’ll have him brewing like a pro in no time.”

_Bullocks._

Draco spends the rest of the class watching Potter finish his potion from a noncommittal distance, telling himself he doesn’t want the Chosen Git to get any ideas. Potter is babbling randomly it seems, talking about crushing seeds and stirring counterclockwise and any number of orders Draco doesn’t want to take note of.

Eventually, the room clears as everyone else leaves for what may well be the last sunny afternoon of a dark fucking year. Even Slughorn pops out, saying he’s "just nipping down to the kitchens for some tea." Draco wants to follow him, _should_ follow him, because he knows the second he leaves Potter won’t have any reason to remain academic.

The door to the dungeon shuts heavily, as if locking them in place. The cogs stop whirring.

“So,” Potter broaches immediately, setting out the ingredients for his draught “have you given any thought to—”

_Two words._

“Yes. No.”

“Whether you’d like my notes?” The Chosen Git raises an eyebrow as he finishes.

“Oh,” Draco can feel himself turning pink. “Yes. Please.”

Potter slides over his book, an extremely ratty edition of _Advanced Potions Making_ with black ink running across the margins. “Speaking of no’s…”

At those words, Draco attempts focus on their task, only to be met with a ghost. “This isn’t your handwriting.”

“What?”

 _Does he think I’m dense?_ “I’ve had potions with you for seven years, Potter. I remember Snape’s hand… Where did you get this?”

Potter regards him for a moment, as if surprised he has the capacity to challenge the Chosen One’s unspoken claims, then says, “Found it on the bookshelf sixth year. I hadn’t planned on taking NEWT potions and didn’t bother buying the book.” He clears his throat thickly. “I, uh, lost it for a while when he told me it was his. I still thought of him as… well, then, a few months after… y’know… an owl dropped it off. I thought he must’ve wanted me to have it.”

Draco nods, trying to ignore the burning in his gut. _We could save him_ , the Potter-voice in his head screams. _You owe me._

The blonde has to remind himself whose voice is shaking up in whose head, unleased.

The thought, unsurprisingly, doesn’t help nearly as much as he thought it would.

 _Two words_.

_How to say no._

Potter checks his watch. “You should start brewing.”

Readily accepting a change of topic, Draco obeys, warming up his caldron with a flick of the wrist. Then there are the thoughts. An overwhelming sense of duty is clouding his cunning, so Draco grabs onto it like never before. The cunning, that is. Self-preservation is the only thing he has ever been able to rely on. The idea that he might _want_ the same way Potter wants, might willfully undo himself in such a way… it is momentous. Terrifying.

_Two words._

_He is becoming all over again._

“Are you just going to stand there?” Draco asks incredulously after a time. “I thought this was a group project. Or is your chosen-ness going to grow arms and cut the beans for you?”

“No, it’s going to crush them, as our dearly departed Headmaster wrote right here,” Potter points to the line in question. “Sadly, he must’ve neglected teaching you to read first.”

Anger flares. The kind Draco is afraid of, the kind that flows from the press of shame. He ices away the rage before smoke can emerge.

“Just get on with it,” Draco orders, passing Harry— _Potter,_ Merlin, what is happening to him—the silver knife and cutting board.

They work in near silence for some time, Draco tied up in the act of concentrating on not fucking up. When a while has passed with no combustion, Potter begins humming lowly.

“Why do you do that?” Draco asks him, annoyed. Potter has never shown any musical inclinations before, but his very audibility is distracting, just like the rest of him. Now, Draco isn’t sure whether he’s stirred three or four times.

“I’m choosing to be happy,” Potter replies shortly, dancing in place while severely off-beat.

“You sound like a tone-deaf mind healer.”

“And you sound like a hater who needs to stir his potion counterclockwise three more times.”

Potter continues humming as Draco stirs. On the third go around, the potion turns pink.

“Perfect,” says Harry over the blonde’s shoulder. His breath is warm and intrusive, but Draco supposes it is not entirely unwelcome. “Okay?’

Draco nods.

(The kiss is soft against his cheek, friendly in a way he does not want it to be. Draco wants fire, but he is terrified of what that could mean.

In this moment, though? He is melting into air.)

When Slughorn returns to his classroom—perhaps a touch sloshed but upright enough to deny it—he finds a tremendously overheated stopper of Living Death on his desk. The potion works well enough, nonetheless.

That night, Draco dreams of home.

Draco remembers being young and in pain. He remembers bookshelves in thunderstorms, blind fingertips grazing over bindings, the feel of rough card being broken by syrupy leather. He remembers retreat—not to spite danger, but for a peacetime kind of reprieve.

He remembers peacetime ending.

Alcoves stir generously into the architecture of Malfoy Manor, scaffolding every spot Draco has found to hide in the years and weeks and seconds he has needed such a place.

_His aunt pulls him from a crack between two bookshelves, calls him a name Draco has not heard in nearly a decade, laughs as she delivers him to evil._

_The Dark Lord says Draco’s **real** name like an indulgence he has not earned._

_Then he tells him how to earn it._

Draco imagines those alcoves darkening, becoming where _they_ had found him in fits of weakness, where they had remembered his previous form, where _He_ still permeates the very dust clinging to those leather bindings—as though it has not been months, as though dirt has the natural ability to trap a soul, and as though Draco should care if it did.

 _He cannot touch you now._ Draco thinks it like a prayer.

And yet the patters traced by those nails and fingertips feel as alive as the skin they’ve infected. **Draco’s** skin. His mark is oil and the memories are enough to light a match, set him ablase. This fire is not special, it does not purify. It burns hot on Draco’s arm when he wakes.

Draco is afraid. He knows, has known for some time, really, that these petty remembrances are stronger than souls. That the damage they wreak can last lifetimes.

That Draco may well be dealing with them for the remainder of his lifetime. And this is what scares him most.

 _Three days after his audience with Him, Draco labels the Boy Who Lived ordinary, steals away_ his _identity,_ his _self. To save the world, of course. But mostly to save himself._

_When he sees what his aunt has carved into Granger, Draco knows he has made the right decision._

The crying boy—young man, legal man, needs-to-be-a-better-man before they take that, too—picks up his wand. He leaves silently, bound for a trip to no-where. The pinhead catches his form mid-leap, sits proudly as he climbs from the net and back into its reality.

Draco checks: The Boy Who Lived sleeps on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternate Title: Art, Objects and Space (4,500 words)


End file.
